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By Root 502 0

skyline. Its light glinted across the Mississippi River and fell onto the midsized Arkansas town aspiringly named West Memphis. Sometime between the rising of that moon and its setting the next morning, something diabolical would happen in West Memphis. Three eight-year-old boys would vanish, plucked off the streets of their neighborhood by an unseen, murderous hand. Under the glare of the next day’s sun, police would discover three young bodies. They would be pulled—naked, pale, bound, and beaten—from a watery ditch in a patch of woods alongside two of America’s busiest highways. But the investigation would unfold in shadow. Why had one of the boys been castrated? How to account for the absence of blood? Why did the banks of the stream look swept clean? The police would stumble for weeks without clues—until the moon itself became one. John Mark Byers, an unemployed jeweler, was the first parent to re

Chapter One

Chapter Two The West Memphis Police WITHIN HOURS AFTER THE BODIES WERE FOUND, Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker, a former prosecuting attorney, contacted Gitchell to offer the assistance of the Arkansas State Police. The larger state police agency could have sent detectives from its Criminal Investigation Division into West Memphis to aid in what promised to be a difficult investigation. But Gitchell declined the offer, and though one state police officer did help conduct some interviews, the role of the state police in West Memphis was minimal.15 Gitchell’s reluctance to involve the state police might have been sparked in part by the misinformation the agency had broadcast in the first hours of the case—information that had been picked up by the paper. Gitchell’s strategy, from the moment the three bodies had floated up from the muck, had been to keep a tight control on information. The less the public knew, he reasoned, the better he and his detectives could work. If no one but the ki

Chapter Two

Chapter Three The Police Investigation: Part 1 WITHIN HOURS OF THE BODIES BEING DISCOVERED, the investigation divided roughly along three lines. These were, essentially, that the children were killed by someone close to them; that they were killed by one or more strangers; or that they were killed, as Gitchell had already hinted, by members of a gang or cult. This unusual third prong of the investigation arose early and was the most sharply focused from the start, while detectives’ efforts in the other two directions often appeared chaotic. Bumbling exacerbated the problem. Though the bodies were found at about 1:30P.M ., the coroner was not called until nearly two hours later. By the time he arrived, fly larvae were starting to appear in the victims’ eyes and nostrils. By 3:58P.M ., when the coroner pronounced the first of the three boys dead, the bodies had been lying in the open air for more than two and a half hours, covered for part of that time with plastic, in temperatures that

Chapter Three

The Police Investigation: Part 1

Chapter Four The Police Investigation: Part 2 Holy men tell us life is a mystery. They embrace that concept happily. But some mysteries bite and bark, And come to get you in the dark. A rain of shadows, a storm, a squall, Daylight retreats, night swallows all. If Good is bright, if Evil’s gloom, High evil walls the World entombs. Now comes the end, the drear darkfall.49 WHILEGITCHELL WAS FEELING BLINDFOLDEDand standard approaches to the case, including investigation of the families and pursuit of tips and leads, had not produced a suspect, interest in Gitchell’s suggestion regarding a “gang or cult” was expanding to fill the void. Adherents to that theory focused their attention on a teenager from Marion who’d written the lines above. While some who read those lines might see in them Gothic influences, such as those that inspired Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King, and others might detect psychological depression or despair, law enforcement officials in Marion and West Memphis concluded

Chapter Four

The Police Investigation: Part 2

Chapter Five The Prime Suspects WHILE A THERAPIST MIGHT